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IN 1778 all France fell in love with a certain American visitor. He was feted in high society and, in the words of his most recent biographer, “cocooned in adulation” (Wright 247). Why? Why did Benjamin Franklin's hosts shower him with their affection and admiration? Perhaps more important for the course of history, why did Benjamin Franklin succeed in negotiating the recognition of the United States when other envoys had failed? He did not even speak French particularly well. Although he easily read French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin, he set out for France with virtually no command of the spoken language and managed to acquire some oral fluency only during the sea voyage. To explain his success, biographers point to his native charm, his amiable and persuasive nature, and his diplomatic skill but, above all, to his profound knowledge of French history, politics, literature, art, and mores-in short, to what we post-Hirschians today would call his cultural literacy.
The concept of cultural literacy has recently aroused lively, at times vitriolic, debates. The most hotly disputed issue is not the how of teaching, which had previously focused the attention of pedagogical specialists, but the what of teaching and studying in schools and universities. In the educational institutions of this country a new battle of the books between ancients and moderns is in progress and has become a major source of contention within humanities faculties.
Should this new “quarrel of the canons” be of concern to foreign language teachers? Can we not sit this one out, lean back, and let our colleagues do the fighting? I think not. In our language courses, literary and cultural texts often provide the educationally significant context, the matrix for language learning that justifies our courses as worthy of playing an important role in liberal arts education. But what literature and what culture do we teach? The possibilities are myriad. Peter Patrikis of the Consortium of Language Teaching and Learning points out our “embarrassment of choice: high culture, low culture, urban culture, suburban culture, rural culture, contemporary culture, the culture of past generations, women's culture, patriarchal culture, adolescent culture, children's culture” (4). We may extend this list ad infinitum, for in our pluralistic and multicultural world new categories and subcategories are constantly evolving and competing for inclusion in the canons of modern curricula.
The traditional canon, “the best that men have thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold's words, was enshrined in school curricula everywhere in Western societies during the course of the nineteenth century; for roughly one hundred years it was the frame of reference for all who would lay claim to being educated. But ever since the sixties this canon, in its role as the quintessential basis of education, has been under attack. A sustained campaign succeeded in dismantling the old canon in various strategic places without much noticeable opposition, until the appearance of two books that attracted international attention, two emphatic defenses of the old canonical approach to education: Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind , which demands a return to the old canon, and E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy , which advocates requiring higher standards of cultural knowledge across the educational spectrum. In contrast to those who liken our age to another Renaissance and glory in its rich variety of cultural discourses, values, and ideas, Hirsch and Bloom see us plunging headlong into a dark age in which the precious knowledge and wisdom of the past are jettisoned, in danger of being irretrievably lost and replaced by ephemeral, vulgar trivia.
Hirsch defines cultural literacy as the fund of information possessed by all competent readers belonging to a certain culture. He evokes the shared store of knowledge that enables educated persons to take up any general text and read it with an adequate level of comprehension and to grasp the central message as well as the unstated implications and the underlying context that give full meaning to what is read.
In other words, Hirsch insists that, to comprehend fully what someone is saying in oral or graphic form, we must understand more than the surface meanings of words; we must understand the cultural context. And this is where he sounds the alarm: between 1970 and 1985, he observes, “the amount of shared knowledge that we have been able to take for granted in communicating with our fellow citizens has been declining“ (5). He opens the book with richly documented horror stories of academic decline and peppers it with examples of egregious student deficiencies in conceptual as well as factual domains: Toronto, it seems, is in Italy; Washington, DC, is in Washington State (according to a junior at USC); two-thirds of the country's seventeen-year-olds, Hirsch reports, have no idea when the Civil War was fought or why; half can identify neither Stalin nor Churchill.
Hirsch and Bloom deplore both the collapse of academic standards and the public's ignorance of basic facts and information. Bloom laments that “the new educational dawn called ‘penness’ has its rosy fingers wrapped around the neck of tradition.” He blames cultural relativism for “the multiversity smorgasbord” of course offerings at institutions of higher learning today, where liberal educators ensure that “all the vulgarities of the world outside the university [will] flourish within it” (speech). And he strongly demands a return to the traditional canon in the name of an eternal human nature, which must grapple with the same existential questions throughout time.
Both books have enjoyed much public acclaim, but they have also incurred a great deal of criticism, not unexpectedly from those who stand accused of having caused the calamity: the professoriat of the humanities. When the MLA invited discussion of Hirsch's and Bloom's books for Profession 88 , the submissions received were by and large scathing attacks.
What is the basis of these attacks? The opponents of the traditional canon propose removing it from curricula because it consists of works written by representatives of the “establishment” culture-white, male, middle-class, capitalist Europeans-for the purpose of indoctrinating the young in the political status quo.
A quarrel of the canons on such a massive scale has perhaps not been seen since the thirteenth-century debate between theology and Aristotelian natural philosophy or since the fifteenth-century argument between humanistic eloquentia and scholastic formal logic. But canon revision takes place on a lesser scale with the passing of every generation.
Hirsch himself has taken the wind out of the sails of the “exclusivity” argument. His adversaries often overlook that, far from advocating a static, great-books approach, Hirsch endorses the views expressed by Orlando Patterson, whom he quotes:
A deep understanding of mainstream culture … no longer has much to do with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, but with the imperatives of industrial civilization … This wider culture … is not static; it is not a WASP culture; it doesn't belong to any group. It is essentially and constantly changing, and it is open … The accurate metaphor … for this wider literacy is not domination but dialectic; each group participates and contributes, transforms and is transformed. (Hirsch 10–11)
Thus, it would seem, those who object to Hirsch and demand the inclusion of previously excluded works are attempting to knock down open doors. In my opinion, however, the opposition to his book goes deeper. When Hirsch insists that, first and foremost, we teach facts again and lists those that “every American needs to know,” the new educationists do not merely point out that the selection of facts is already interpretation and that the perspective from which we select them is tacit theory. They call into question the entire concept of the “compartmentalized knowledge” of the printed book and hold that facts can no longer be accumulated and placed before us in neat, easily digestible, alphabetized lists.
Indeed, our postmodern era seems to assert that no student, no professor even, can claim to encompass the total domain of cultural knowledge, not even in one specialized field. How can we presume to manage the contemporary explosion of factual knowledge, of factual data, that makes a mockery of all attempts to codify and order the information once and for all? Lists, such as the one assembled by Hirsch, can be drawn up at best as an amusing party pastime for the purpose of playing Trivial Pursuit.
Like our modern universe, which has been enlarged multidirectionally by electronic databases paralleling the human consciousness and its many associations, facts are available in a constant flow in “hypertext” form to be continually reshaped and redirected to follow the thread of ever-changing theories. We have an overabundance of facts, and even the “facts‘ of science, once believed to be of unshakable certainty, now appear dependent on ways of seeing the world—that is, on what Thomas Kuhn calls paradigms and what others speak of as disciplinary matrices, les catégories de pensée , and so on-the perspectives that frame intellectual problems and solutions in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. “With the end of linear specialisms and fixed points of view, compartmentalized knowledge became unacceptable,” wrote Marshall McLuhan in 1962 (302). There is mounting resistance to characterizing our own era through the pursuit, or the knowledge, of certain facts, the basis for defining previous eras. The search for method, the search for theory, is proposed as the modern way to knowledge.
Bloom, while conceding that “it is obvious that books are used by nations and religions to support their ways and to train the young in that way,” adds that “it is equally obvious that books that continue to maintain their place in the curriculum do so by their own merit” (speech). Thus Bloom and his supporters are willing to accept a selection process based on the human ability to respond to an aesthetic quality that inheres in some texts and not in others. But it is precisely this position that is being questioned-this faith in the objective capability to judge on apolitical, purely aesthetic grounds what should and what should not be allowed into the canon.
Relativists claim that these judgments are primarily political-that the notion of an object aestheticism is highly suspect and that the privileging of it is in fact unconsciously ideological. We may think we are maintaining standards on aesthetic grounds when in fact our choices are political.
If we assume that the relativists are right in their claim that knowledge is never neutral, that anything one says or thinks is, in fact, political, how then should we guide the young in their search for intelligibility in the world? How do we help them establish their moral personae? What canonical works do we assign? Whereas the traditional canon seems to many of us to speak of ourselves, it does not appear to function this way for our postmodern students as the role of literacy in their lives outside the classroom becomes increasingly remote. What once was accepted as the formation of the self, or the quest for the self, through the written word of the Bible and Shakespeare or Dante or Goethe or Cervantes is no longer undertaken. Those “classical” works suggested to us-that is, to all human beings-who we were and are. They formed us. They determined our actions, thoughts, and feelings. Those were the texts through which we lived.
Undeniably, most of our current students do not seek their identities, their self-understanding, in the works of the orthodox canon. And this seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. Even middle-aged professors from outside the Western orbit complain that, while they and their generation still quote the traditional masters-Confucius for Taiwanese professors-their students' idol is Michael Jackson.
How then can we prepare the young when the traditional canon no longer has a formative meaning for them? How can we respond to this immense challenge? What will be essential to individual and collective self-understanding? Must we abandon the entire canonical enterprise? If so, what kind of pedagogical material might serve our students in this postmodern era of cultural diversity?
Many of today's theorists, including Paul B. Armstrong, demand that students learn to “negotiate the competing claims of multiple ways of reading” (29). In other words, to foster the self-realization of students, teachers must first educate them in the interpretation of competing discourses. To us foreign language teachers the request for the study of “competing discourses” has a familiar ring about it. Have we not long praised the study of foreign language, literature, and culture for providing a unique opportunity to introduce students to values and forms of expression belonging to other-often competing-traditions?
Unhappily, foreign language teachers who draw on the traditional canon of the target culture often convey a static vision. Texts are studied in the traditional ways set down by nineteenth-century ideology and based on the linear, teleological form of history writing whose aim was to elaborate and inculcate the national character. While it would seem absurd to teach nineteenth-century science today, in the humanities the analogous practice appears to be quite in order. The great masterpieces of the target culture are examined for the exemplary figures that embody its quintessential, perennial attributes, which are studied in a monolithic, static, ahistorical manner.
Is it not high time that we foreign language teachers acknowledge the mutation of discourses within the target culture? What if our object were to study the reception and formation of the traditional canon and if, with Roland Barthes and in contrast to Allan Bloom, we postulated history and culture instead of an immutable human nature? What if we studied newly accredited values and analyzed the values they replaced? What if we showed students how and why certain works of literature achieved a place in the canon of a particular culture? Such an endeavor might represent a first step toward a reconciliation of the more flexible elements of the traditionalist and relativist positions. We can satisfy Bloom's and Hirsch's demand that texts of the traditional canon be actually read. For it stands to reason that a text must have a careful reading before it can be placed in a context and analyzed for its ideological perspective. Provided that the relativist position is an honest one, in that it does not itself hold a hidden political agenda, then perhaps ancients and moderns need not remain irreconcilably opposed.
In fact, we might achieve this rapprochement by establishing what Hans Robert Jauss calls “the historical horizon of the origination, social function, and historical influence [of the text].” As he explains the basis of his theory, “Literature and art only obtain a history that has the character of a process when the succession of works is mediated not only through the producing subject but also through the consuming subject-through the interaction of author and public” ( Toward an Aesthetics 18, 15).
To make the dialogue between a work and its audience comprehensible to students, we can situate a text within the value system of a particular society and trace the change of that value system; in other words, we can put literary works in an ideological perspective and teach students to recognize the ideological relativity of canonical texts. If students can discover historical changes in moral and political values and understand that tastes and mores are tied to a period in the history of a particular society, then they cannot avoid confronting the same questions about their own society and its canon formation and cannot help becoming aware of their own ideological biases and assumptions.
By reconstructing what Jauss calls “the horizon of expectations” that formed the work and presided over its reception, we can raise the questions that it answered and thus learn how the contemporary reader could have viewed and understood it. As Jauss claims,
This approach corrects the mostly unrecognized norms of a classicist or modernizing understanding of art … It brings to view the hermeneutic difference between the former and the current understanding of a work; it raises to consciousness the history of its reception, which mediates both positions; and it thereby calls into question the apparently self-evident claims that in the literary text, literature is eternally present, and that its objective meaning, determined once and for all, is at all times immediately accessible to the interpreter. (Toward an Aesthetics 28)
In teaching foreign languages and literatures we have a unique opportunity to expose students to a number of competing narratives, not only to the various national narratives but to the narratives of different social groups in time. We can help students acquire a truly pluralistic literacy, that is, to master diverse ways of reading that will enable them to recognize the political and moral implications of diverse ways of understanding. This goal is by no means easily achieved. Students generally persist, even in the face of over-whelming evidence, in reading their own values into any text. How then, in concrete terms, can we go about this task?
Canon formation is one of the themes of a secondyear core-curriculum course in language and culture that we have been offering at Harvard since 1983. Entitled Social Criticism through Humor, the course examines cultural institutions and values as they figure in French literary texts from the seventeenth through the twentieth century and analyzes them as targets of criticism. One of its aims is to study changes in reception over time, the way that a particular ethical system or concept can be rejected in one era and adopted in the next.
We start the year by reading Molière's Misanthrope and by juxtaposing the several value systems to which the work bears witness. A seventeenth-century play composed by a master of social analysis lends itself particularly well to our purpose because of the contrast, the competing discourses, afforded by studying the last great nonbourgeois society of the Western world in comparison with the modern societies of urban, industrialized, bourgeois professionals. Unlike feudal society, court society has not receded so far into the past that it is already idealized. The societal structure of the ancien regime reminds us, the bourgeoisie of the Western world, of a bitter struggle barely past that we won at great cost. The antagonists of two hundred years ago are still the antagonists.
In Molière's time The Misanthrope did not in any way appear “classical.” It was an avant-garde play, opening up new ways of seeing things, rejecting a set of values that would henceforth be considered deplorably old-fashioned, and accrediting the brand-new values of the “modern” court of Louis XIV. On the one hand, of course, students recognize that the values of the reign of the Sun King are not those that prevail today, and, a fortiori , are not their own. On the other hand, Molière's renown and prestige create a need, almost an obligation, in their minds to agree with his values. This conflict over values generally explodes by at least the second class, and resolving it always represents a tour de force for those of us teaching the course.
The Misanthrope deals with the problem of truth and hypocrisy in social life, with the timeless paradox that, even though we find lies distasteful, social life presupposes a certain dose of falsehood, Tartuffery and role playing. “Social lies” serve a respectable purpose in adult human relations. They oil the wheels of social intercourse, and we generally take them for granted because without them our everyday interactions would be grim and hostile. This issue has been debated at least since the time of the ancient Greeks in an effort to determine what might be called the point of civility: the point up to which, on the one hand, untruthfulness must be accepted as a means of making social life smooth and feasible and beyond which, on the other hand, it becomes blatant and unacceptably offensive, turning into grotesque hypocrisy.
This point is not static. There are periods in history when it shifts abruptly in one direction or the other. Notable shifts occurred during the Romantic era, which saw a revolt against the social lie and a desire to return to a more open, Rousseauesque, frank interaction with one's fellow human beings, and again, closer in time to us, during the turmoil of the 1960s, when there were similar demands for a simpler life and more transparent relationships.
But at the time of Molièere the point of civility moved in the other direction, and the humor of the play for the author's contemporaries lay in seeing the protagonist, Alceste, behave in an outdated way in his contact with the world both in matters of friendship and in matters of love. Although Molière's great dramatic skill allows each character, even the most foolish, to speak words of wisdom-Alceste's satire of court life rings true-ultimately the play ridicules the misanthrope for preferring the old straightforward frankness, which was now considered rude, to the new, refined, elegant forms of courtly diplomacy.
This perspective is obviously totally alien to today's youth culture. Students have been taught since birth to admire the natural, open, and frank and to abhor the artificial and pretentious. A movement toward greater civility and greater politeness-for politeness is artificial by definition-seems to them evil.
Alceste, the comic hero, does not appear comic to students, and they are right, for as Jauss states, he is not comic in himself but only seems so against the horizon of certain expectations. Alceste exemplifies the “comic of counterimage,” where comparing
is itself clearly part of the process of reception: the person who does not know or fails to recognize what a given comic hero negates need not find him comic. This makes clear the cognitive function of this kind of comedy. Through the comic hero, aesthetic or moral norms can be thematized; their apparent “naturalness” or never explicitly formulated currency can be brought to consciousness; they can be ridiculed with the intent to amuse or problematize by critical seriousness. ( Aesthetic Experience 191)
Undergraduates tend to be dualistic. They believe there is a right and a wrong in any situation, and they ask to be told which is which. In the battle between directness and falseness, how can anyone hesitate over which side to join? Students instantly declare themselves opposed to the social lie and baffled by Molièere's appeal for a more refined, polite, civilized environment. In their everyday lives they may be perfectly adept at the art of diplomacy and manipulation (in negotiating better grades and less work, for example), but to be confronted in print with a famous, respected classical author who does not call for greater honesty, greater frankness, openness, and authenticity in human relations-shocking!
An analogous difficulty surfaces as we examine the ideal of the honnête homme. Our society conditions us to dismiss courtiers as frivolous, artificial beings and to resist all empathy toward them. It is an immense challenge for a student to see courtiers in the context of their existential situation, which explains their behavior and worldview, and to analyze the problems with which life confronted them and the solutions they found. “The literary work['s] social function in the ethical realm is to be grasped according to an aesthetics of reception in the same modalities of question and answer, problem and solution, under which it enters into the horizon of its historical influence” ( Aesthetic Experience 41-42).
Students wonder how the nobility could have fallen into Louis XIV's net, given up their independence, and moved into the “prison” of Versailles. Students ask, Why were the aristocrats so touchy about form? Why did they place such importance on aesthetics, etiquette, and external appearances? Why were they hypersensitive to “incorrect” behavior? The insights of historians like Georges Duby and Philippe Ariés, philosophers like René Girard and Michel Foucault, and sociologists like Hannah Arendt; those of the Durkheim school, such as Roger Caillois and Georges Bataille; and particularly those of the historian Norbert Elias in his brilliant studies of changing personality structures-all these can help bring students closer to the historical, cultural, anthropological, and economic factors that shaped the aristocratic life-style. With such guidance students can learn to understand the values generated by conditions of life radically different from theirs and to appreciate perspectives unquestionably incompatible with their own.
Students are accustomed to a society in which social stratum depends on wealth or profession. Since a profession provides us with an identity, differences of social rank can remain concealed in our interactions with others. When students are introduced to a society where the principal instrument of social mobility was neither professional competence nor money but polite, pleasing conduct, where social reality was rank and esteem, where elegance of manner and taste (for us purely private matters) were public prerequisites for social success and prosperity; and where the loss of esteem in the eyes of peers meant as much as a major financial loss does to us, they necessarily look at the world differently and recognize that systems of values and concerns can vary with time and place. A challenge of one's own belief system is implicit in this learning process.
Through interaction with texts and canon revision, students can recognize that the insights a piece of literature yields depend on the questions put to it. To ground the canon in an aesthetics of reception and influence means to reconstruct the historical process by which readers have received and interpreted texts at different times and in varying ways. During the nineteenth-century formation of the canon, for instance, Molièere's plays were dusted off and enshrined in the classical pantheon, but in this process the meaning of The Misanthrope was turned upside down and inside out to make the play acceptable to contemporary values and the prevailing political agenda. The ethic of the ancien régime had been replaced by the bourgeois ethic of the Third Republic. Alceste, the once ridiculous detractor of the “modern” court society of Louis XIV, became the valiant hero, the would-be reformer of the “corrupt, artificial” courtiers, whereas Philinte, Molière's perfect honnête homme, was henceforth the detestable villain. Thus we study what Jauss defines as “the successive unfolding of the potential for meaning that is embedded in a work and actualized in the stages of its historical reception as it discloses itself to understanding judgment” ( Aesthetic Experience 30).
By illuminating multiple ways of reading, examining the different underlying frameworks, and discussing the process of canon formation-the interests that determine canonization and the values and biases a canon defends, eliminates, or deforms-we can help students realize that any system of interpretation is itself a creation of history. They discover their own individual and collective biases; in other words, they discover historicity.
The importance of a piece of world literature, its intellectual or aesthetic power, is in no way diminished if we seek its psychohistorical, sociological, or anthropological context. Many of us, unlike Bloom, see the works of the old canon no longer as unsurpassable witnesses of an eternal human soul but as testimonials of a certain relation to life and the world that is no longer ours.
During the nineteenth century the British prepared their young for a changing world by grounding them thoroughly in ancient Greek culture. Similarly, when we study the great works of the traditional canon along with samples of the new, it is not so much the particular text we choose but the approach we take to teaching it that matters to our students' education.
Let us by all means open the door of our canons to new elements, to a pluralistic literacy, and assist in the elaboration of a true world canon. But if the search for method, the search for an approach to things, is the new way of studying who we are, so that the choice of substance is of secondary importance, then why should we not choose to apply contemporary theories and practices to analyzing at least some of the enshrined works of the old canon? Through the works of a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Goethe, a Cervantes, or a Molière we can perhaps best comprehend the forces that shaped and took control of the discourses of particular societies. Furthermore, the survival of these consecrated works into later ages permits us to analyze how societies reveal themselves through their changing responses.
If we as teachers elucidate past canon formation and examine the implications of competing interpretations, then we sensitize students to the limits of interpretive conventions throughout history and hence to interpretive conventions that compete for recognition in their own culture. At the same time, we further our students' cultural literacy, so that if, for instance, one of our French majors should be a Benjamin Franklin, he or she will be able to communicate with representatives of the French culture on the basis of their own cultural literacy.
The author is Senior Preceptor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.
Armstrong, Paul B. “Pluralistic Literacy.” Profession (1988): 29-32. Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon, 1987.
——— .Speech. Kennedy School Forum, Harvard University. Cambridge, 8 Dec. 1988.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Cultural Literacy. Boston: Houghton, 1987.
Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982.
——— . Toward an Aesthetics of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1969.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962.
Patrikis, Peter C. “Is There a Culture in This Language?” ADFL Bulletin 18.3 (1987): 3–8. [Show Article]
Wright, Esmond. Benjamin Franklin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.
© 1991 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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